Human milk immune factors, maternal nutritional status, and infant sex: The INSPIRE study.

Objectives: Breastfeeding is an energetically costly and intense form of human parental investment, providing sole-source nutrition in early infancy and bioactive components, including immune factors. Given the energetic cost of lactation, milk factors may be subject to tradeoffs, and variation in concentrations have been explored utilizing the Trivers-Willard hypothesis. As human milk immune factors are critical to developing immune system and protect infants against pathogens, we tested whether concentrations of milk immune factors (IgA, IgM, IgG, EGF, TGFβ2, and IL-10) vary in response to infant sex and maternal condition (proxied by maternal diet diversity [DD] and body mass index [BMI]) as posited in the Trivers-Willard hypothesis and consider the application of the hypothesis to milk composition.

Identification of Cell Surface Molecules That Determine the Macrophage Activation Threshold Associated With an Early Stage of Malignant Transformation.

The ability of immune cells to sense changes associated with malignant transformation as early as possible is likely to be important for the successful outcome of cancer immunosurveillance. In this process, the immune system faces a trade-off between elimination of cells harboring premalignant or malignant changes, and autoimmune pathologies. We hypothesized that the immune system has therefore evolved a threshold for the stage of transformation from normal to fully malignant cells that first provides a threat (danger) signal requiring a response.

Reversible Click Chemistry Tag for Universal Proteome Sample Preparation for Top-Down and Bottom-Up Analysis.

Successful proteome analysis requires reliable sample preparation beginning with protein solubilization and ending with a sample free of contaminants, ready for downstream analysis. Most proteome sample preparation technologies utilize precipitation or filter-based separation, both of which have significant disadvantages. None of the current technologies are able to prepare both intact proteins or digested peptides.